Best beverage for Oracle DBA... :-)
What is the best drink for the planned night outages of Oracle DB?
Interesting error message (or trust your alert log)
My colleague was shutting down RAC instances because some important HW maintenance on
servers which Oracle instances are running on. He issued as usually "shutdown immediate" command and database was closed and dismounted correctly and also the instances had stopped. Quite normal...
But during start of instance at the mount phase there was following error occured:
ORA-201 controlfile version incompatible with ORACLE version
Ok, never faced this error in the past so I checked the oerr and the output was:
00201, 00000, "controlfile version %s incompatible with ORACLE version %s"
// *Cause: The controlfile was created by incompatible software.
// *Action: Either restart with a compatible software release or use
// CREATE CONTROLFILE to create a new controlfile that is
// compatible with this release.
Hmmm... that's very interesting, the error message said that "controlfile was created by incompatible software" but we didn't change anything...
Also as you can see in the message that I got there is missing the arguments (compare the message with oerr output).
OK, what about messages in alert.log? I can say that only alert.log gave to me the real picture about problem...
***
Corrupt block relative dba: 0x00000001 (file 0, block 1)
Fractured block found during control file header read
Data in bad block -
type: 0 format: 0 rdba: 0x00000000
last change scn: 0x0000.00000000 seq: 0x0 flg: 0x00
consistency value in tail: 0x00000000
check value in block header: 0x0, block checksum disabled
spare1: 0x0, spare2: 0x0, spare3: 0x0
***
ORA-201 signalled during: ALTER DATABASE MOUNT...
As we are using multiplexing controlfiles (of course) the solution was quick.
Just to be sure I used the md5sum command and checked all three controlfiles and only the first had different checksum.
Since I work with Oracle I saw lot of situations when controlfile was corrupted but usualy the error messages were ORA-00227,
ORA-00202 but for first time with ORA-201 which is IMHO misleading in this case...
Question is why one of control files become corrupted when DB was closed and
unmounted clearly and without any problem and why we got ORA-201 (instead of ORA-00227, ORA-00202) which is misleading (IMHO)
in this case. Also it is very strange when the error message is missing additional parameters.
So trust to your alert log and of course use the multiplexing of control files (I hope that
actually you are)...
Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 Comments [2]
Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2.0.2) for Solaris x86 released!
Finally! Oracle Database 10g R2 for Solaris x86 was released on monday (18 September 2006). You can download it from Downloads section (as usual) on Oracle website.
I will be install it during the weekend and my first feelings from installation will be posted here (maybe along with link to installation paper).
I'm back...
It has been long time (almost two months) since last update of my blog.
Somebody might thought that my blog is dead. Fortunatelly it is not truth.
Reason for that long break was very simple. I needed to off and spent my personal time on different location than on chair behind the computer. So I splitted my personal time between ice hockey and golf.
Ice hockey season started couple of days before the last post on my blog. We are playing ice hockey 3 and sometimes 4 times per week and at the begining (after the summer break) I was very tired after the game.
Usually I'm playing the left defender so I'm not scoring too much. Anyway until now I scored 9 goals (one hattrick).
Also I'm watching the ice hockey as fan (really big) of my city club HC Slovan Bratislava. They started very well and after the 4th round they are on 1st place of the league roster.
In days when I wasn't on ice hockey stadium I was playing (or better I was learning how to play) golf. I decided to learn golf 2 year ago but there wasn't enough time to start. I spent many hours on the golf course (also many hours on driving range and other practice areas) and prepared to final exam for green card. Of course I was learning the rules and golf etiquette which is more important than technic. Now I'm green card holder and almost every weekend I'm enjoying that beautiful game...
But I'm back now and I'm ready to blogging. Stay tuned!